ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the network of transactions as analysed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one can identify a similar pattern of a triangular network involving labour, commodities and British finance. Slavery, coming to an end in British colonies by the 1830s, did put the plantation islands under Britain in a fix due to shortages of labour. Faced with shortage of labourers, at end of slavery, the planters started pressuring the British government to help out their fortunes, which was in a state of disarray. The indenturing of labour from the British colonies like India, which continued until the 1920s, was a quick solution to redress the problems faced by the plantation islands. Labour in those plantation islands was used to cultivate raw sugar, to be transferred to Britain to process as white sugar, both for home consumption and for exports.
